No one has said it isn’t incredible. I think it’s incredible that anything exists at all.
Incredible as it is, it’s no more incredible than the commonly cited alternative. As a matter of fact, it’s maybe even less incredible, if there is such a thing.
Where was your"soul" before you were born? Was it sitting around waiting to jump in at a time when the people who conceived you? Why doesn’t it just return to where it was before your conception? Did your soul give you life, or did life give you soul?
Monavis
I don’t think I can say with certainty whether there is a soul* or not, but for those of you who have all these questions about the soul (e.g. why is it a certain way and not another, monavis’ questions above, etc), all you have to do is think about, say, World of Warcraft.
In that game, each of the characters are controlled by a consciousness outside the game, and that consciousness will continue existing long after the character in World of Warcraft has died.
So, questions like “Where was your ‘soul’ before you were born? Was it sitting around waiting to jump in at a time when the people who conceived you?” can be asked about World of Warcraft, in which case we see how easy the answers are.
e.g: Where was your ‘soul’ before you were born?
- In 10th grade in a California high school. Then it paid some money to the company that owns World of Warcraft and the character was born.
I’m not saying that our world is exactly like World of Warcraft. I’m simply saying that we cannot be certain of the exact structure of our world (e.g see SentientMeat’s favorite alternate possibility ), and so we cannot say for certain what a “soul” might be and what it might and might not do.
Having said that, my position is that, with the current scientific data, there is no proof of anything like a soul.
- Let’s say soul is a guiding consciousness that exists independently of your body and will continue to exist after your body dies.
Hey - I forgot about this thread. Oops.
I’d like to get away from the meme that belief in a soul is just a wish - that one only believes in it because they want an afterlife. I’m sure that’s often true, but it’s possible to believe in a soul with no belief in afterlife, and, even recognizing that the belief in soul is comforting, it’s possible to get rid of that reason and still have others.
I’m not afraid to disbelieve in soul (or consciousness). I really just can’t eliminate it because the explanations given here don’t cover everything to my satisfaction.
I once heard someone explain that it’s much easier for nature to hardwire a program to tell you ‘yes, I’m aware - I’m conscious’ than to go to all the trouble of creating a real consciousness. The problem with that is if you’re not conscious you have no need to have that software “fooling you.” There’s nobody to fool. My PC doesn’t have that software because it never asks itself the question.
I’d also like to get away from the discussions about which is more incredible - a bunch of organic matter that became self-aware or a god who imbued it. They’re both incredible.
And yet we have the end result.
This sounds really ground-breaking, but I have to confess stupidity - I don’t follow. Your result strikes me as the question restated. I have no physical evidence of consciousness within me, and yet I have lots of evidence that I am conscious. It is a paradox, I’ll grant you, and one way of resolving the paradox is to conclude that energy within the matter is just that and nothing more, thus our presupposed conclusion of consciousness is wrong.
But it doesn’t satisfy me. I’m not talking on a spiritual level, but an intellectual one. I can see that I’m supposed to come to the conclusion that consciousness isn’t centralized, isn’t real - that there’s no ‘driver’ in the seat, but there’s a big elephant in the corner. I am aware.
Screen Door Jesus. 
YES, I definitely DO believe in a soul! However, I’ve always wondered if the soul could be actually just another kind of physical state, which exists in the Afterlife (which is the physical environment where the soul resides.)
Perhaps in the future, science will develop instruments to measure and interact with this other physical reality, which may prove itself to be just another part of the natural world.
With that in mind, even atheists could start studying things like the soul and life after death and not have to believe in a supreme being. Existence of the soul and of life after death shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand and ignored by atheists and others! Why should religions hold all the cards?
There could be some grand scientific discoveries made as a result of researching the soul and the afterlife. There could be some hard, substantial science here and ignoring it just seems wrong. Science should just swallow its pride and treat it as a mystery that can be solved!
There’s no indication there’s a mystery to be solved. What, precisely, are scientists supposed to look for ? What should they try to do, what should they test and experiment on ?
Science doesn’t do much research into souls for the same reason there isn’t much into goblins and angels; there’s nothing to study. Pride has nothing to do with it.
You’re right, it doesn’t satisfy me either. I find it very bothersome. Yet, it’s there… our presupposed conclusion of consciousness is wrong. We KNOW we’re conscious. We’ll swear it on our mother’s graves. Yet there’s NO WAY we can actually know it. There just isn’t. We can never truthfully, rationally claim we’re conscious (as long as we say that we’re not able to prove that fact to anyone else, as is the common understanding). And yet we KNOW we are… I know there’s something in me, allowing me to look out… And yet i WOULD say that, wouldn’t i? A computer with a camera will also pronounce the words “i perceive”. Somehow it all makes sense, and yet it doesn’t at the same time.
It’s one hell of a mindfuck. I don’t know what it means. But it’s there.
It’s unfortunate that you’re the only one who responded to my point.
That’s pretty much where my belief system is coming from. Death moves us to a different state of being.
On this issue like the supernatural issues, Dopers seem to take it as written that their belief that there isn’t a soul is the only valid position (see Der Trihs’ post). Nobody here has proved that there isn’t a soul, just like I can’t prove that there is; their belief is only that, a belief. If you state a belief as a fact long and vehemently enough, it doesn’t magically change into a fact.
It isn’t “just a belief.” It is the logical conclusion derived from two premises: 1)There is no evidence that compellingly suggests the existance of souls, and 2) No object should be believed to exist for which there is no compelling evidence.
The latter premise is a philosophical precept that is pretty universally accepted. You are free to dissent from it (and some do), but you should then be prepared to explain why you believe in souls but not pixies.
The former premise is a matter of some judgement. Some people believe that there are philisophical arguments that provide compelling reason to believe that there is a non-physical component to conciousness. I have studied these arguments and find them flawed and unconvincing, but I respect those who evaluate them differently. Few of these arguments posit anything like a supernatural entity that exists after physical death, and I think you would be hard pressed to find a philosophical argument for such a thing.
Some base their belief in a soul not directly on any philosophical argument, but on a complex metaphysical system whch is supported by some compination of philosophical reasoning and personal (and communal) experience. I have studied these belief systems extensively, and believe that the philosophical support for them is seriously flawed and that the record of personal experiences that support them (including my own once very compelling experiences) are insufficient to the claims made. Nevertheless, I understand that others have different experiences and that their subjective evaluation of them will necessarily differ from my own. I respect those who evaluate the philosophical and empirical issues differently.
Some people presumably base their belief in a soul on some personal experience without regard for the philosophical implications of doing so and without consideration of other evidence. These people deserve the same respect as those who beleive in aloen abductions because they saw lights in the sky once.
Anyone who believes in a soul for no reason at all, and justifies as “just a belief,” akin, one might suppose, to the belief that blue is a pretty color or ponies are cute, deserves (and I’m sorry to say this to you directly) no respect for their belief at all.
I find it likely that you do, in fact, have some evidentiary basis for your belief along the lines of what I outlined above. As I said, I believe that evidence is flawed and far from compelling. Others are less respectful of those who evaluate philosophical and empirical arguments differently or are quicker to infer that such people lack any reason for believing. Regardless, the belief that there is no soul is not “just a belief.” It is a belief supported by a simple and robust logical process, a sylogism of which both premises have prima facie support and are difficult to refute.
What “mystery” are you referring to? What do you think needs to be explained. Just because you can conjecture a magical, invisible object like a “soul” does not mean that the question of its existence suddenly becomes a “mystery” to be solved. You’re statement makes no more sense than saying that “science should just swallow its pride” and admit that the existence of smurfs is a “mystery that can be solved!”
Science looks for explanations of observable phenomena. The cause of uman consciousness is not a “mystery” and does not require any consideration of magical explanations any more than gravity or wind.
Can you prove there is no such thing as wood nymphs?
The position of empiricists like me is that there isn’t any reason to posit the existence of “souls” (a concept which still hasn’t been coherently defined, by the way). As long as a given phenomenon can be explained by natural processes, there is absolutely no reason to resort to magical explanations. Just because you can make something up in your head doesn’t mean that it has any default presumption of plausibility which must be overcome and “disproved” by anyone else.
My apologies. The second quote in my post directly above should have been attributed to featherlou.
If an observable (by more than one observer) phenomenon *can’t[/t] be explained there is still absolutely no reason to resort to magical explanations.
Science is the business of the study of those things that are observed and so far haven’t been explained.
In addition to what the others have said, atheism does not require lack of belief in a soul. Buddhists are atheists in a sense, but believe in a soul (in some sense.) It is not clear to me that many of the mystics who thrived in England in the late 19th centuries believed in a god, but they certainly believed in souls.
The reason you think as you do is that many atheists, especially the ones you find around here, apply the same analysis to the soul as we do to God. We find that long searches have not found evidence of either, that there are problems explaining how they came to be, and neither has any predictive power. Thus, your confusion.
I hope you are aware that people have been “scientifically” searching for evidence of a soul for 150 years, and haven’t come up with anything. Unless you have some new research program, you need to explain why it isn’t a waste of time. Sure, the potential rewards are great, but the same is true for alchemy, and we seem to be okay with giving that research program up for lack of results.
I thought the non-existance of the soul was one of the original tenets of Buddhism, anatman. Of course, later developments have modified most of the original tenets in at least some sects, and Vajarayana (Tibetan) Buddhists seem to have a fairly solid concept of souls. But then, they’re hardly atheist, either. Alas, my familiarity with Buddhism isn’t what it once was–perhaps you could elaborate?
A few people have said something like this, and I pick yours to respond to - but this is in answer to everyone who’s said you start with the ‘null hypothesis’ that something doesn’t exist until there’s evidence it does.
I agree with that, so I don’t believe in fairies or werewolves or the Loch Ness Monster (although Nessie was the one I always wanted most to believe in).
But, while I can’t think of a way to measure it or demonstrate it, I have compelling evidence of self-awareness, evidence which I haven’t seen satisfactorily explained away.
I realize that consciousness != soul (from now on let’s just understand none of these have been well-defined); however, consciousness, which I believe in because I have evidence that you haven’t convinced me is fake, implies something different than our current definitions of matter and energy.
If physicists announced tomorrow there’s good evidence that energy is itself slightly self-aware, and when controlled can become very self-aware, I’m prepared to accept it.
But right now I have this thing - self-awareness - that I can’t fit in with my understanding of ‘plain’ matter and energy.
There’s nothing necessarily exotic about energy being self-aware. The atoms that make up our brains are composed of energy with mass being bounced around by energy that is massless, and the special arragement and exchange of all that energy may be all that is needed to give rise to consciousness. One needn’t have a full understanding of the nature of consciousness to look dimly on the possibility of something wildly unaccounted for by our current understanding of how energy interacts and otherwise behaves being the answer. All evidence so far points to a problem of enormously huge complexity, which, while vexing, is not a cause to abandon the well-tested theories of electromagnetism to go searching for some as-yet-undiscovered vital force, no more than one needs to look for such exotica in the spiraling of water down a drain or the scattering of light off rough surfaces. What’s likely needed are more elegant methods for making complex systems more tractable, and more computational power, and to the extent such efforts have been successful, they tell us pursuing that program will continue to be fruitful. If experience is any guide, more forays into vitalism will simply result in more wild goose-chases.
What you’ve identified here is the mind-body problem, which I agree is relevant even though mind (conciousness)!=soul. Even though you were responding to Dio, who is better versed in it than I am, I think I have something to say about it and how I resolve it.
Some philosophers look at arguments such as Alex_Dubinski aluded to, and decide that consciousness does not exist. They are eliminitavists.
I am not one of them. (Neither, I’m almost certain, is Dio.) Like you, I have utterly convincing (but uncommunicable) evidence that I am conscious. I accept the scientific evidence that much of what I percieve about my conciousness is illusory, but I perceive that illusion, and that perception makes me undeniably conscious.
I further agree with you that based upon what we know about material things (matter and energy) we would not expect to find conciousness in a purely material universe. If we started with a universe that we think we know to be material, and then upon examining it, discovered conciousness, we might reasonably be surprised and consider this an anomaly.
But consider it the other way around–we start with a universe that contains conciousness. What sort of universe does it seem to be?
I consider this by asking the following question: If a purely material universe could produce conciousness (and still be purely material), what would I expect such a universe to look like? If such a thing were possible, I would in fact expect it to look like our universe. I would expect that material beings possessed of consciousness would be able to explore and examine most of the physical world, just as we have. I would also expect that consciousness would be difficult for these beings to examine, because it is inherently subjective.
This is what my Philosophy of Mind professor used to call the “you can’t eat my lunch” phenomenon. You can’t experience my conscious experience directly, because as soon as you do, it becomes your conscious experience. My experience can only be experienced by me, and this is what makes experience (and consciousness) inexorably subjective. It’s maddening because everything else in a purely material universe is objective. This makes consciousness an anomaly and produces the mind-body problem. But this is exactly what I would expect to happen if a purely material universe could contain consciousness.
By contrast, I ask myself what I would expect a dualistic universe, containing both material and spiritual componants, would look like. I would expect to see some physical evidence for a spiritual componant. I would expect to see actions without apparent cause, but which confirm to some non-random principle. Examples of this would be if good people were rewarded, or if people experienced knowledge they could not have obtained physically, or if memories and feelings were independant of a physical process in the body. Note that I wouldn’t necessarily expect any one of these things, but I would expect some form of evidence or experience that indicated the existance of a non-material componant to the universe besides the fact of consciousness. (And in fact, most people who believe we live in a dualistic universe seem to expect something like that as well.)
Of course, in either of these cases I might be wrong about what to expect. I might also be basing my “expectations” on what I’ve already concluded. Nevertheless, I think it is a valid thought-experiment, and that it tells us far more about the possability of a non-material soul than the question of what we expect from matter and energy does.
I do.
I pretty much do what I please, when I please, where I please. I have chosen to accept constraints on that in the interest of harmony in society, but within those guidelines, I am as free as a bird.